Good day Reef master,

I looking to change my Lowrance Elite 4, for a more advance unit.

I would like your input of the best (comercial sonar) unit for accurate waterdepth processing.

Can you please tell us the best markets units to proccess data on Reef master?

regards
Luis
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What is the reason for wanting to upgrade? Are you unhappy with the accuracy of your current unit, or are there other features that make you want to upgrade? I'm not convinced that more expensive units provide better depth accuracy, although others might have a different opinion - in which case I would be interested to hear it.

Hi my unit is broken.

Water ingress.

I would like to buy a unit that can give best results processing with reefmaster.

Regards
Luis

A couple of years ago I bought a Lowrance Hook 5 to use with Reefmaster to map reefs and coral heads in Fiji. The system did not work well for me because vertical reef walls got averaged out into gradual slopes that looked nothing like the actual reefs. I believe my issue was not the display and processing unit but that I had a transducer with too broad a beam. So I would appreciate a discussion on the best transducer or transducer type for use with Reefmaster.

There are a few differences when it comes to what sonar-model/ brand is beeing used, but that is mostly due to different output (wattage) and that again is most prominent in deep water. The cheap models typically output around 3-500w while the more expencive units output around 1000w.

What is important is the tranducer used. If accurate depth (and thus, mapping) is your goal you want a transducer with a narrow coneangle. The thighter it is, the better. Airmar P66/B60 has a fairly narrow coneangle on 200 kHz while TM260/B260/M260 is even better.

I use Reefmaster to manually draw the location of steep reefs that I can then display in my Simrad plotter. These lines are created using sidescan mosaics. RM does a good job (see image) of creating the contours but I find the extra visual information helpful. I colour code these lines to indicate productive fishing reefs.

Hello as said Team Colibri, it is more the probe its angle, low frequency and chirp will allow with the power to reach great depths that plays an important role, but in most cases a simple simple sonar enough from that you can save the data either on SD card or live!
On the other hand to make mosaics side, there have a very good sonar allows to have amazing images!